The relevance of Leon Trotsky’s writings against fascism
The great crisis of the capitalist system that began in 1929 opened a period of intense class struggle and acute political polarization that manifested itself in the radicalization of decisive sectors of the working class, and in a succession of abrupt and turbulent turns of mind. politician of the middle classes.
The world bourgeoisie, made up of the sharks of finance, the large industrial consortiums and international trade, together with the landowners, the high magistracy of the State, the military and the Catholic Church, felt their vital interests threatened and turned their eyes towards dictatorial solutions, towards fascism.
In the maelstrom of that economic and social crisis, parliamentary democracy, which had been the form of government of the capitalist bourgeoisie in the most advanced countries, proved quite incapable of disciplining the working class. Obviously the possibility of a revolutionary triumph in Germany, France and the Spanish State was very present in the situation.
The strength of the German, French or Spanish proletariat was beyond discussion. They had powerful social democratic and communist organizations, mass unions, cooperatives, and even armed militias determined to confront fascism. And yet, the political errors of its leadership, weighed down by reformism and class collaboration, and in other cases by ultra-leftism, allowed the fascists to have a formidable margin.
In January 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany without the social democratic and Stalinist leaders (of the SPD and the KPD) being able to mobilize millions of workers in a general strike and organize any type of armed struggle. The old and conciliatory SPD called for respect for the decisions of the leadership of the Republic and considered the handover of power to the Nazis to be democratic. The KPD leadership consoled itself by repeating Stalin’s regrettable phrase: after Hitler it will be our turn.
Barely a month later the Nazi-led government imposed emergency legislation, outlawing the KPD and imprisoning more than 4,000 of its leaders. Throughout his first year in office, Hitler also outlawed the Social Democratic Party and the unions, and unleashed a wave of repression that in a few months sent more than 27,000 unionists and leftist activists to prison and concentration camps.
Four months after Hitler’s triumph, Leon Trotsky, expelled from the USSR in 1929 and resident until then on the Turkish island of Prinkipo, arrived in France.
The book begins with an accurate analysis of the deep causes of the fascist attempt and the social processes that the capitalist crisis had unleashed. Trotsky addresses key questions that are also very useful for the current moment.
France, red hot
For more than four years, Trotsky’s contact with the European labor movement had been maintained almost exclusively by correspondence or through visits by militants from different sections of the Left Opposition. But distance was not an obstacle for Trotsky to demonstrate insight and a capacity for analysis incomparably greater than his political opponents. His writings on the German situation in the period prior to Hitler’s assault on power bear evidence of this.
In France Trotsky came face to face with a pre-revolutionary situation. The financial debacle impoverished important sectors of the middle classes, who began to abandon the Radical Party, desperately seeking alternatives to both the right and the left.
The French left, socialist and communist, is baffled by the depth of the crisis. The Socialist Party, whose bombastic official name was the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO), was internally divided between a right wing, the neo-socialists, who began a drift that led them to fascism and collaboration with Hitler, and a wing left, represented mainly by young socialists, who quickly turned towards Marxist and revolutionary positions.
The French Communist Party, which at its founding had brought together the majority of the organized working class, was languishing and losing militancy as a consequence of the abrupt zigzags that Stalin imposed on the parties of the Communist International. The ultra-left theory of the “third period”, which repudiated the Leninist united front policy and considered the socialist parties as a variant of fascism (“social fascists”, in the language of the time) had isolated the PCF and, just as there had been happened with the German Communist Party, it was annulled as a revolutionary actor.
In this situation, the French fascist organizations, to which Hitler’s triumph had given notable daring, tried to take advantage of the prevailing chaos. On February 6, 1934, they attacked parliament and although they did not even take the reins of state power in their hands for a moment, they caused a change of government and deepened the instability of the regime.
Some texts to guide you in turbulent times
The texts collected in this book begin with an accurate analysis of the deep causes of the fascist attempt and the social processes that the capitalist crisis had unleashed. Trotsky does not stay on the surface of events and is able to see beyond appearances. Over the course of almost two years, following day by day the sudden changes in the French class struggle, Trotsky faces key questions that are also very useful for the current moment.
What defines a situation as revolutionary? How to correctly measure the mood of the working class without being fooled by their apparent apathy? What program is necessary to win the middle classes for the socialist revolution? How to build day by day a united front of workers capable of advancing the movement and pushing back the fascist threat? What role does the arming of the working class and the constitution of its own militias play in all this? Why are the policies of class collaboration, embodied in the French case by the Popular Front, powerless to stop fascism and prepare the way for the defeat of the proletariat?
All these questions are answered by Trotsky in this book, a must-read for all revolutionaries. In short, it is an essential text not only to better understand what happened in the 1930s, but also, and this is surely the extraordinary value of this work, to understand the current situation, the social dynamics that is already underway and the risks it entails for the working class around the world.
We invite all militants who today fight against the injustices of a decaying society, against oppression and imperialist war, who are seriously concerned about the rise of the extreme right, to read this book and reflect on the valuable conclusions that it contains. poses.
But, above all, we encourage all readers to put into practice the conclusions that emerge from the ideas expressed in the following pages by León Trotsky: transform the wealth of theory into the weapon of revolutionary organization.
